5-9-24 *INTERVIEW* Steve Goreham New Book 'Green Breakdown: The Coming Renewable Energy Failure'

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
As the radical environmental left wants usto electrify absolutely everything. They not only
seem to forget that the power hasto be generated somehow, but they also
forget that we may simply not havethe capacity anytime soon to not just create,

(00:21):
but distribute the amount of power thatwould be needed if they got what
they wanted. And that was beforeadding in what may soon be one of
the biggest electrical power using industries we'veever seen. Joining us to talk about
it. Steve Gorum. He's executivedirector of the Climate Science Coalition of America.

(00:45):
He's written four books on energy andclimate and sustainable development and so on.
His most recent book is Green Breakdown, The Coming Renewable Energy Failure,
and Steve just sort a piece fora really good piece for the why examine
are entitled The Looming Electrical Power Shortage. Steve, Welcome back to KOA.
Hey Ross, great to join youagain. Good introduction. We do have

(01:10):
coming probably a decade long electric powershortage when demand is going to exceed supply
or at least people are going tobe constrained by what they want to do
with electricity. And as you say, most people know about the green push,
which is electric vehicles, which ishome appliances that are electric instead of
gas or propane. There's a pushby the federal government also do a thing

(01:34):
called green hydrogen fuel. They wantto run hydrogen, They want to run
industry on hydrogen, and maybe someof our vehicles. But the biggest thing
is the demand for artificial intelligence justpopped up in the last two years or
so, and this is going tobe bigger than the other three. So

(01:55):
give us a sense of the scaleof the likely electrical usage. Just said
bigger than the other three. Butcan you help us understand even more,
like how much electrical demand are wetalking about for AI? Yeah, very
very big. Today about four percentof electricity in the United States goes is
used by data centers. And datacenters are big warehouse buildings acres in size,

(02:19):
filled by servers and they provide theInternet and all the rest. But
we just had chat GPT come outabout a year and a half ago,
and we have in Nvidia Corporation nowgiving everybody high speed processors to upgrade so
they can do artificial intelligence. Andonce these what they want to do is

(02:42):
artificial intelligence is to get machines tothink like people. Basically, and they
have a very long learning phase wherethey literally have tens of thousands of processors
that run for weeks or months,twenty four hours a day to do this
learning so that they can produce applicationfrom it. And right now we have
the big companies Amazon and Microsoft andAlphabet, Google, Meta that are building

(03:12):
servers around the country and they're alsoupgrading. We have about twenty five hundred
data centers right now with servers thatare being upgraded. So this four percent
of rise is probably going to goto about twenty percent of US power demand
in ten years. Wow. Justa tremendous amount of power shortage. And
just to give you some specific examples, the New York state data center market

(03:37):
is expected to grow over fifty percentby twenty thirty a. Virginia is projected
to more than double by twenty thirtyfive. These firms have actually come to
Virginia and said, we need acouple gigawatts. That's like we need two
nuclear power plants in Virginia. California, Georgia, Texas, and the Pacific
Northwest are going to have shortage.Listen to this quote by Jason Shaw,

(03:59):
chairman of the Georgia Public Service Commission, he said, quote when you look
at the numbers, that is staggering. It makes you scratch your head and
wonder how we ended up in thissituation. How are the projections that far
off? He means the demand projectionsfor electricity. This has created a challenge
like we've never seen before. Solet me just jump in because we've only
had a three minutes or so,and I want to really dig into this

(04:21):
a little bit. So what happensif someone started building a data center and
they need a whole bunch of powerand they just connect to the grid as
it is now, and then suddenlythere's more demand on the grid than the
grid can supply on a summer daywhen people's air conditioners are on. What's
going to happen, Well, usuallyhave to get a license from the electricity
provider. And although we have somethings like Amazon just purchased a data center

(04:46):
that is co located on the sitewith a nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, and
so they're going to get all thatpower. The thing is that these folks
are really big and they're offering thesehuge contracts, and so what I think
is going to happen is is alot of this electricity is going to go
to the data centers, and theneverybody else is going to get kind of
short changed, which means electricity pricesare going to rise for the average user,

(05:09):
for people that are trying to hookup evs to chargers, for people
who want to put heat pumps intohomes, and so we're going to have
rising electricity prices and the big guysare going to get what they need.
Probably. Wow, the way,Colorado has fifty three of the nation's twenty
five hundred data centers, and you'repretty low electricity prices about eleven cents of
kiloot hour lower than the national average. There'll probably be a bunch of people

(05:32):
in Colorado that won't upgrade their datacenters to this AI capability and maybe build
a bunch of new ones. Wouldn'tsurprise me if they do that in Utah.
Also, I know I think NSAhas an new armists facility in Utah,
but there's a lot of empty spacethere they could put up their silly
solar panels. But I do wonderabout tying back to the Amazon thing that

(05:55):
you said. If the Nuclear RegulatoryCommission is giving approval, and I think
they have at least some baby stepsso far to a small modular reactor.
If they could do a couple moreof these, then do you think some
of these data centers, do youthink we'll, like, not next year,
but in ten years or something,be in a situation where data centers

(06:15):
will partner with power companies and buildtheir own miniature nuclear plant right next to
the server farm. Well they could. So here's what's going to happen.
First off, the green movement wantsto shut down all the natural gas forty
three percent of electricity and all ofcoal, which is still sixteen percent fifty
nine percent of our power. Thatis going to stop. Nobody's going to

(06:36):
be shutting down those plants. They'regoing to be extending life of plants like
the Diablo Canyon plant in California gotextended for five years, and they're restarting
a nuclear plant in Michigan. That'sthe first impact. The second one is
that these higher electricity prices are reallygoing to impact charging companies. They're going
to have very tough time breaking eventhese plans for sheet pumps and northern latitudes

(07:00):
are not gonna work very well.Right, So this has the potential to
just shut down the green movement inthe United States. Well, at least
there's that upside to look for.I means, as Herbstein said in something
that sounds trite but is actually deep, he said, if something cannot continue
forever, it will stop. Andthat's kind of what's going on with the

(07:25):
green movement. They've got out.We're just like all this other radical left
of stuff, the DEI thing andall of this. The pendulum has swung
way too far, and I thinkwe've I think we've hit peak everything,
you know, I kind of do, and I hope that the green rat
Look. I love the environment too, but I'm not a moron, and

(07:46):
I don't want everybody's quality of lifeto suffer as we as we kneel at
the altar of Gaya. Steve gorm, I'll give you the last fifteen seconds.
Yeah, sure. Look for mybook Green Breakdown, the Coming Renewable
Energy Failure. It's on my websiteSteve Gorum g O R E h A
M dot com. I'll send hima signed copy. All right books available
as well. Awesome and folks,if you forget any of that, just

(08:09):
go to Rosscominski dot com. Clickon the Thursday blodcast. I've got links
to Steve's website, to his book, and to the Washington Examiner piece that
we were talking about today. Steve, thanks for your time, great conversation. Thanks Ross